In the Wright tradition,
John Randal McDonald pursues an organic vision of design.

by Thomas Connors

I
didn't want to just paint pictures," says John Randal McDonald. "I wanted
to do something where I could be in the picture. Then I read The
Fountainhead and that absolutely blew my mind away. I had to be
Howard Roark, I had to be an architect, I had to do it my way."

A
Wauwatosa boy who liked to draw, McDonald had meant to osketch a future
for himself studying fine art at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
But after graduation and a stint in the Navy (he read Ayn Rand's tale of
idealism vs. commerce aboard a carrier in the Pacific), McDonald set off
for Yale on a new course of study.

"I
think what I admire most about John Randal McDonald," says local architect
John Vetter, who toddled around a house McDonald built for his parents in
1953, "is his unwavering commitment to a vision of organic, Frank Lloyd
Wrightian, Prairie School architecture. John is, gosh, maybe one of six
contemporaries of Wright who is still active and the only guy I can think
of still practicing who has actually pushed the vocabulary into some
exciting architecture."

Recalling his McDonald-made home in Elm Grove, Fred Vetter notes, "A
friend was planning on building a house with this architect from Racine,
and he said, 'Boy, I'll tell you, what a job he does, it's just fantastic
and it's very inexpensive.' He drew something up and it really wasn't
anything we should have had in the area because most of the houses were
Colonials. I said, 'Let's change this a little bit,'" he laughs. "Well,
John didn't change it a hell of a lot and I went ahead and built it."

Although McDonald never studied with Wright, his homes share the
ground-hugging shapes and strong horizontal lines so often at play in
Wright's work. But built decades after Wright's own masterpieces, they hum
with an atomic age energy all their own. And while never a minimalist of
the Miesian sort, McDonald stripped away millwork, paint and Sheetrock in
favor of natural wood, stone and glass. Often tiny by today's standards
(soaring, soulless foyers and great rooms that reduce people and furniture
to laughingly Lilliputian proportions), McDonald's houses remind us that
space and volume are not the same thing.

In
fact, McDonald doesn't have much
patience for the contemporary notion of what makes a house a home.
Speaking from Florida (after raising five kids, he and his wife of 54
years split their time between the Sunshine State and a design studio in
Whitefish Bay), he says, "Here I'm sitting in the land of milk and honey,
where people talk of spending $10 million for property and another $10
million for the house, oh, and they'd like about 30,000 to 40,000 square
feet. And they all want the same thing—they
all want a wedding cake type of house, with all the tiers and
bric-a-brac—stick a candle in the top and light it."

So he
goes his own way, relishing the work as much as he ever has. Now in his
70s, he's negotiating with a manufacturer to reproduce some of his
furniture designs; developing a plan for the Schlitz Audubon Center;
creating new homes in Texas, Florida, and Waukesha; and adding on to some
of his landmark residences in Mequon, Manitowoc and Racine.

"My
favorite words—mark this down—my favorite
words in this world are, 'Would you be our architect?'"